Media Coverage (or not) of RCP8.5 RIP
The biggest story in climate science in decades has been mostly ignored
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Last week here at THB, I published a post announcing the most significant development in climate science in decades. It is truly huge news.
The international committee responsible for official IPCC scenarios had declared the high-end scenarios — RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0 — to be implausible. These scenarios have dominated climate research, headlines, and policy for the better part of two decades.
Today I review who in the “mainstream” media has covered this major story and who has so far ignored it.
The Dutch media is out in front
The most substantive mainstream coverage came from the Netherlands — perhaps fittingly, since Detlef van Vuuren, lead author of the ScenarioMIP paper that announced the new scenarios and a fixture across generations of climate scenarios, works at Utrecht University and the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
De Volkskrant, one of the country’s largest outlets, ran the story on its front page on May 4 under the headline: UN Climate Panel Drops Doomsday Scenario. The story notes that a few years ago De Volkskrant did a self-audit of its own climate coverage and identified 54 articles it had published on RCP8.5 studies.
Science journalist Maarten Keulemans, who wrote that story, posted on X: “This is so huge. Mind-blowing. Crazy. The IPCC admits what’s been circulating for a while: the highest doomsday scenario, 8.5, no longer matches reality. ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU READ ABOUT THE CLIMATE FUTURE IS WRONG.”
Van Vuuren was quoted in De Volkskrant and his comments were notable. The consequences of 3.5°C warming are “vervelend genoeg,” bad enough already.
Van Vuuren characterized the new high-end warming in 2100 as 3.5C, which is considerably higher than the ~3C that I estimated from the available data that the ScenarioMIP posted online and using the same climate emulator. Interestingly, Van Vuuren’s framing — centered on the high scenario, rather than the medium “current policy” scenario — misuses the new high end scenario in a manner that the paper he led said to avoid: by using it as a projective reference scenario, rather than an exploratory “what if?” exercise. I am sure we will be seeing more of this sort of misuse of HIGH. Everyone loves the most extreme scenario available.
Van Vuuren attributes the need to retire the upper end scenarios to changes in the real world rather than basic flaws in the scenarios. As THB readers well know, this is just wrong. The high end scenarios were always off target, because they were based on flawed assumptions of a world that was going to dramatically expand coal use. Van Vuuren explained to De Volkskrant: “The world has fortunately developed. Renewable energy has become cheaper quickly. And, even if it is still too little, there is climate policy.”
Credit to Van Vuuren for acknowledging that the elimination of the extreme scenarios will be very disruptive: “That all sorts of forecasts will now have to be revised is difficult. But it obviously cannot be the case that we fail to adjust our scenarios for that reason.” He also mentions that the low scenarios have increased.
He added: “And if we do too little about greenhouse gas emissions, you will automatically still end up at higher values. It just happens later, after 2100.” I guess that leaves the door open for a 2150 or 2200 return to RCP8.5.
NPO Radio 1 broadcast a segment featuring Marcel Crok, of CLINTEL (which has graciously translated several THB posts into various languages), who had argued since 2018 that the extreme scenarios were untenable. The segment’s title is: “It became a favorite scenario of scientists.”
German-language coverage
The Berliner Zeitung ran a balanced piece, arguing that “extreme climate scenarios played too large a role in public debate for too long” — while cautioning that the retirement of RCP8.5 does not mean climate research was fundamentally wrong.
The Swiss outlet watson.ch covered it under the headline “World Climate Council Drops the Worst Scenario RCP8.5” — repeating van Vuuren’s “vervelend genoeg” as “schon schlimm genug” (bad enough already) and noting Zeke Hausfather’s warning that warming could still exceed 3°C.
Die Welt also covered the story. The article’s subtitle is hard hitting: “A lobby made RCP8.5 famous: The most sensationalist of all climate scenarios has determined scientific studies, media and politics — yet it is unrealistic. Now it is actually being phased out.”
English-language climate silence
Remarkably, there has not been a peep from the major U.S. or international news outlets that publish in English.
The New York Times has been perhaps the most prominent English-language home for promoting news stories based on studies that rely on RCP8.5. They’ve said nothing about its retirement.
The BBC ran a More or Less episode on the RCP8.5 problem in December 2025 — Why did the climate change model get it wrong?. Kudos to them, but they have published nothing on the cancellation of the extreme scenarios.
Carbon Brief — the specialist outlet that has covered RCP8.5 more than perhaps any other English-language publication — has been silent.
Neither Science nor Nature has covered the retirement of the extreme scenarios. So far in 2026, more than 2,600 studies have been published using the high-end scenarios and tens of thousands before that — so this is a really big story within science.
The Guardian, which ran many dozens (hundreds?) of stories premised on RCP8.5 projections over fifteen years, has run nothing.
Charitably, we might attribute the lack of English-language coverage to lag time or the story’s technical nature. Of course, those issues were not a problem for the Dutch and German media.
Less charitably: the outlets most invested in their longstanding promotion of RCP8.5 have the most to lose from a clear-eyed accounting of what its retirement means for science, policy, and their own coverage.
The fallout from the retirement of extreme climate scenarios has not yet begun. Watch this space.
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I don't see any reason to be charitable to the press in the US. This news goes against their narrative and if we know one thing it is that stories that run counter to the narrative do not get published.
Two comments here: (1) to be more fair, you should have noted that the WSJ has not yet covered it yet even though it has been more willing to cover the RCP 8.5 issue; and (2) for me the most important policy implication of the death of RCP 8.5 is whether it now makes sense to go back to natural gas as a bridge fuel because we have more time. This is a complicated argument, but I would like to see you grapple with that.